Book Review: The Nickel Boys

 The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead

    This book is grim, depressing, and infuriating. It's also extraordinary piece of writing depicting a horrific experience that seems all too common in the BIPOC community. 

    Although it's a fictional tale, the story is based in fact. Indeed it is based on facts showing that throughout the United States, Canada, and large parts of Europe, the dominant class structure always has mistreated, abused, and tortured others -- mostly women and people of color -- simply because it can, and it wants to. 

  

    Elwood Curtis is the narrator of his tale. As the book begins, he is an older Black man living in New York City who owns and runs a cleaning company. Then he see reports exposing the defunct Nickel Academy's history of  abuse and neglect, along with the discovery of dozens of bodies buried on its property.

    The story then shifts to Curtis's years as a young Black boy living in the wrong side of the tracks in Tallahassee, Florida, in the 1960s. Of course, because of discrimination and segregation, all Black people lived on the wrong side of the tracks in Tallahassee, Florida, in the 1960s.

    Curtis is a smart kid, and his mother encourages him to educate himself and enrich his mind. He becomes enamored of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his words and actions, and strives to rise above the racism and bigotry surrounding him. But while hitch-hiking to his first day of college classes, he is picked up by a man driving a stolen car. Police stop them, and Curtis is charged with being a juvenile delinquent. He is sent to the Nickel Academy, a so-called reform school in small town Florida.

    Of course, the "academy," based on the Dozier School of Boys, is anything but a reform school. The boys are segregated by race -- with the exception of one Mexican boy, who is sent to either the Black side or white side, based on the whims of the "teachers." Both sides are horribly abused, subjected to random corporal punishment, having their meals withheld, and being sent out to work for local politicians or businessmen, with a small fee for the "headmaster." Some of them are sent for extra punishment, from which they seldom return.

    Whitehead explores the relationships Curtis forms with other boys in the home, along with his experiences with the headmasters. Curtis tries to accept his lot, while maintaining his dignity and fighting back against the cruel abuse the boys are subjected to. He also steps in when some of the other  boys turn on each other.

    The more he learns about the Academy and its "students," called the Nickel Boys, the angrier he becomes.

    The book reaches a high point when Curtis and Jack Turner, his cynical friend and roommate, decide to take action against the crimes of the adults. It's a scary yet compelling narrative that keeps you reading long into the night.

    The novel earned Whitehead his second Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The first was in 2017 for Underground Railroad. "It burns with outrageous truth,"Josephine Livingston said in The New Republic. about The Nickel Boys. The Guardian newspaper said Whitehead showed "how racism in American has long operated as a codified and sactioned activity."